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ATMOSPHERES by Peter Zumthor

San Benedicto Chapel (Sumvitg, Graubünden, 1988)

I’m going to make some comments about ‘atmosphere creation’ that came (randomly) to my mind while reading his work:

The things we like and the way we perceive them as good or bad is because they’re under the influence of the experiences we are building day by day, which modify our thinking patterns as the time goes by, just like IA. There’s also a biological reason that explains the fact that people have certain common fears, and that’s ‘cause all the survival info is kept in the depths of our brain.

The subconscious (helped by our senses) allow us to capture info from the spaces that surround us without noticing, letting us remember old memories. By stacking memories we also build ourselves, how could we explain the fact that we all have different likes and get emotional towards different things it the sentence above wasn’t true?

At the end of Zumthor’s text I realised that he achieves to give the same atmosphere to his literature work as well as his architectonic: order and naturalness.

Now let’s jump into the ‘answers’ that caught my attention:

1st ANSWER: THE BODY OF ARCHITECTURE

About the comparison between music and buildings, I think that a construction could even make us feel more than just music by itself, because the first one implies only une sense whereas the in second one take part a lot more of them.

The simile he makes about the human body it’s quite accurate and at the same time a way to approach us no nature in some kind of way.

Both of them take us closer to the idea that we can be more interactive with the spaces that are designed and built, in order not to see them just as a dead object, but something deeper that has a connection between material objects and people.


2nd ANSWER: MATERIAL COMPATIBILITY

Infinite possibilities to build starting with the same material as long as ideas don’t stop flowing.


3rd: THE SOUND OF A SPACE

The acoustic and distortion of the sound in each room is different, it it’s something we gotta take into account when we design a space because it makes us feel and remember. It’s a big concern in the auditoriums design.

Philharmonie de Paris, Grand Salle, with ‘cloud’ ceiling

5th: SURROUNDING OBJECTS

We’re deeply linked to some furniture/objects we don’t wanna get rid of. Maybe it’s because they’re in the family for too long and are part of the legacy or because are souvenirs that remind us of a special trip. They’ll all be in the home, so we gotta take into account the place they’ll occupy in the future.


6th: BETWEEN COMPOSURE AND SEDUCTION

Importance about the space distribution and arrangement in order to get the people’s movement freedom feeling. The opposite tho this freedom would be that Ikea does so that customers don’t miss any of the products they sell (narrow corridors, only one direction, no shortcuts to go from one place to another…)


>his work: